Combat

Starting a Fight

To attack someone in the same room, type attack <name> (or fight <name>, combat <name>, engage <name>; they all do the same thing). If the target is a combatant NPC, the fight begins immediately. If the target is another player, the rules depend on where you are.

Zone rules:

• Open zones, most of the world. You can attack freely.
• Safe zones, certain areas (including parts of Zhūwān) block PC-initiated lethal combat unless a stealth alarm has been triggered. You will see an error if you try. Use spar for friendly practice here.
• Consent zones, attacking a player sends them a challenge. They must accept before the fight begins. The game will tell you if a challenge is pending.

You cannot attack your own side, and you cannot attack RP-only NPCs who have no combat training.

Sparring

spar <name> opens a friendly match that uses the same mechanics as real combat but tracks “touches” rather than HP damage. When your touch count hits your max HP, you are touched out and the round ends without anyone being hurt. Sparring is allowed in safe zones and is the standard way to practice techniques or settle grudges without consequences.

The Round Structure

Once combat starts, every participant configures their action for the round through the combat quickmenu. The round does not resolve until everyone has marked their input complete (or the input timer expires).

Each round follows this sequence:

1. Input phase. The quickmenu opens for each participant. You set your choices in any order, then mark Done.
2. Resolution. When all inputs are in, the engine resolves the entire round at once. Each fighter makes one main roll at the start of resolution; there is no mid-round dice rolling.
3. Results. Narrative text describes what happened. HP totals update. The quickmenu reopens for the next round.

If you submit your choices and change your mind before the round locks, type attack (with no arguments) to reopen the menu and adjust.

The Combat Quickmenu

The quickmenu is a hub: a single screen with seven configurable slots that you visit in any order before marking Done. The slots are:

Slot	What you set
Action	Your main action: Attack, Defend, Dodge, Sprint, Ability, Flee, or Surrender.
Tactic	A tactical stance for the round (see below), or a tactical ability if you have one.
Flavor	A free-text hint (up to 140 characters) describing how your character is fighting this round.
Movement	Where you want to move on the hex map.
Use Qi	How many qi dice to spend on your roll.
Options	Weapon selection (melee vs ranged) and reckless-movement toggle.
Style	Switch to a different combat style for the round (takes effect next round).

Each slot shows a checkmark when set, and the Done button confirms validation messages so you can see what is still required.

Flavor

The Flavor slot is the easiest way to colour a fight without writing emotes between rounds. Whatever you type, up to 140 characters, is fed into the round’s prose layer as a hint. It does not affect dice; it shapes how the engine describes what your character does this round. Use it to set a mood (“circling, watching for an opening”), a target (“focus on her wrist this time”), or a tone (“savage, no restraint”). Blank or clear resets it.

Main Actions

Action	What it does
Attack	Strike your current target. The default choice.
Defend	Focus entirely on blocking and parrying. Reduces incoming damage.
Dodge	Move out of harm’s way. Different defensive profile than Defend; your style determines which is better for you.
Sprint	Move aggressively across the battle map. Covers more ground but leaves you vulnerable.
Ability	Use a martial technique from your combat style (see below).
Flee	Attempt to break out of the fight and move to an adjacent room. Not guaranteed to succeed.
Surrender	Give up. Ends the fight for you (the outcome depends on your opponent).

You can also change your attack target mid-combat: attack <name> while already in a fight switches your focus.

The Main Roll

At the start of round resolution, every active fighter makes one main roll. That single result is the engine’s read on how well your character performs this round; it powers both whether attacks land and how hard they hit, with damage scaled by the threshold table below.

The roll is 2d8 exploding on 8: two eight-sided dice, and any die showing an 8 rolls again and adds. Combat does not add a flat attribute bonus to this roll, so what shapes the result is your active style and its abilities, the qi dice you spend, and your accumulated wounds. Any qi dice you spent on the attack are added on top, and your wound penalty is subtracted (each HP you have lost drags every threshold down, so a battered fighter both lands less often and hits softer). Style abilities can sweeten the roll further: extra exploding faces, rerolls, or guaranteed minimums.

If your roll wildly overshoots a target’s defence, that excess feeds into the damage threshold table; a glancing roll over the line still hurts, but a brutal overshoot can carve multiple HP off in one round.

Standard Tactical Actions

The Tactic slot lets you adopt a stance for the round, separate from your main action. The stances are:

Stance	Effect
Area Denial	Block enemies from moving past you. Lateral movement within 1 hex of you is denied, and climbers get kicked back down. Qi Lightness users bypass this.
Qi Aura	Each attacker who hits you this round deals 5 less damage. Costs your qi regeneration for the round.
Qi Lightness	+3 hexes of movement, and you ignore terrain penalties (hazards, climbing). Costs your qi regeneration for the round.
Guard	Protect an adjacent ally. 50% chance to redirect their incoming damage to you, with a +2 damage modifier on the incoming hit.
Back to Back	Mutual protection with an adjacent ally. 25% one-sided redirect, rising to 50% with -1 damage if both of you take the stance.
Shove	On your first completed melee attack, push the defender directly back 1 hex and follow into the hex they vacated. Walls, occupied hexes, and forced-movement immunity can stop the shove.
Companion Assist	If your animal companion is summoned, send it to aid an ally anywhere on the battle map. Each assisting companion gives that ally +1 to every damage threshold for the round.
None	Skip the stance, no effect.

If your style includes tactical abilities (healing techniques, buffs, debuffs, sect-specific manoeuvres), they appear here alongside the stances. Tactical abilities resolve during round resolution, not as a standalone main action, so you can pair them with an attack.

The Tactic menu also surfaces environment options when relevant: smashing a window adjacent to you, breaking a debris pile to clear or block a path, detonating a munitions crate within reach.

Qi in Combat

Qi fuels both attack and defence. You begin each fight with a pool of qi dice. Spending them on an attack rolls those dice and adds the result to your damage. Spending them on defence rolls them as armour against incoming strikes. Each die explodes on an 8.

You gain qi as you take damage; adversity sharpens it. The pool caps at 3 dice, and you regenerate a fraction of a die each round even without taking hits. Two stances (Qi Aura and Qi Lightness) consume your regeneration for the round in exchange for their effect.

Combat Styles and Abilities

Your active style determines which abilities you can use and how your basic attacks behave. Outside combat, list and switch with:

stance               -- show your current stance and all known styles
stance <style name>  -- switch to a different style

Inside combat, style switching goes through the Style slot of the quickmenu and takes effect at the start of the next round.

Abilities are special techniques drawn from your martial style. Each has its own effect: extra damage, debuffs, repositioning on the hex map, ally protection. They appear in the menu under the Ability action when available. Using an ability costs qi dice and may impose a cooldown.

Restrictions in special fights

When a fight is launched as part of a stealth mission, the engine quietly filters your ability list to two flags: abilities marked non-lethal and abilities marked stealthable. Anything you know that fails either filter is hidden from the menu, since a stealth mission turns into a much harder problem the moment a guard is killed or a wall comes down loudly. A few styles are predominantly lethal; expect those characters to lean on basic attacks and tactical stances during stealth work.

Sparring does not hard-block abilities. The same menu options are available, but all damage is converted to touches against your sparring max, so killing strikes simply touch you out instead of taking you to the floor.

The Hex Map and Movement

Every fight runs on a hex grid: you, your opponents, terrain features, and hazards all occupy specific hexes, and most actions care about the distance between them. The webclient renders the grid graphically alongside the quickmenu. For screen-reader and text-only play, the combat command gives you the same information in plain text.

Reading the map with combat

The text-mode interface (also aliased as cb, ci, fight status, battle) prints a clear list of who is where and what they can do.

Command	What it shows
combat or combat status	Round, phase, your HP / Qi, enemy count.
combat enemies	Each enemy: name, HP, distance in hexes, weapon, status.
combat allies	Same detail for allies.
combat recommend	Suggested target with reasoning (low HP, in melee range, etc.).
combat actions	Available actions this round, with command syntax.
combat menu	The quickmenu rendered as numbered text.
combat help	Full subcommand list.

Distances are always in hexes. HP is always shown as current/max. A typical melee weapon reaches 1 hex; ranged weapons reach further. The combat system always treats melee as adjacent (1 hex); reach mainly affects when segments compress.

Movement

The Movement slot in the quickmenu lets you set where to move during the round. You can move toward someone, away from them, to a specific hex, stand still, flee, or perform style-specific moves like wall-flip. Sprinting (as your main action) lets you cover more ground at the cost of defence.

Base movement costs 1 hex per movement point. Hazard hexes (see below) cost 2. Qi Lightness flattens all that back to 1 and lets you climb any elevation difference without needing a ramp or stairs.

Map features

The hex grid is richer than just open ground. The terrain you fight on can include:

• Elevation. Hexes carry an elevation level. Attacking from higher ground gives you up to +2 on the attack roll; attacking from lower ground gives you the inverse penalty. Climbing or descending more than 5 levels in one step requires a ramp, stairs, or ladder hex; otherwise you cannot make the transition without Qi Lightness.
• Walls. Solid wall hexes block movement and (depending on type) line of sight. Doorways, archways, and openings are passable; gates and doors only when open.
• Cover. Many hexes carry a cover object (a tree, a column, a stack of crates, debris). Cover gives the occupant defensive benefit against incoming attacks across the line of sight.
• Windows. Breakable. Adjacent fighters can smash them through the Tactic menu, creating a new path or an open_window hazard tile.
• Breakable elements. Crates, statues, and similar can be broken to clear or alter the battlefield. Munitions crates can be detonated for an area effect.

Hazard hexes

Hazards are tiles that affect anyone standing on them or moving through them. The full list includes:

• Fire and fire hazard: damage on enter or end-of-round.
• Oil: slips you on entry, ignites if a fire reaches it.
• Sharp ground: cuts feet on entry.
• Puddle and frozen patch: slip or knock-down risk.
• Long fall: an exposed edge; being shoved off is bad news.
• Open window: passable but exposed.
• Poison cloud and ice zone: persistent zones inflicting on residents.
• Pressure zone: triggers an effect tied to who steps on it.

All of them double movement cost for ordinary fighters, and most of them inflict their own damage or status on top. Qi Lightness ignores the cost (but not the secondary effect, so don’t sprint through fire).

Studying Other Fighters

study <name> lets you quietly observe another character to learn something about their combat style. Each time your target performs an emote in the same room, there is a chance you catch a glimpse of one of their styles. There is also a chance your target notices the scrutiny. Use study stop to end the observation.

How Damage Resolves

Romance of Five Kingdoms does not subtract raw damage numbers from HP directly. Instead, raw damage is compared against a threshold table to determine how many HP you actually lose. The thresholds shift based on how wounded you already are.

Base thresholds (unwounded):

Raw Damage	HP Lost
0 to 9	0 (miss)
10 to 17	1 HP
18 to 29	2 HP
30 to 99	3 HP
100 to 199	4 HP
200 to 299	5 HP
300+	6+ HP (scales upward)

Wound penalty. Every HP you have already lost shifts all thresholds down by 1. If you are at 4 out of 6 HP (2 HP lost, penalty of 2), the miss threshold drops from 9 to 7, meaning 8 raw damage now deals 1 HP instead of missing. The more battered you are, the easier it is to hurt you further.

Early hits feel glancing, but fights can turn quickly once someone accumulates wounds.

Healing and Recovery

Characters have 6 HP by default. Losing HP does not just lower your current health; it also degrades your maximum HP over time.

How degradation works. Each time you take cumulative damage equal to your current maximum HP, your maximum drops by 1 (minimum 1). Your current HP is capped to the new maximum. A character who fights repeatedly without resting eventually has a lower ceiling to heal to.

Recovering current HP between fights:

• Rest naturally. Simply not fighting restores current HP to your current maximum over time.
• Activity rest rounds. Group activities and adventures include dedicated rest phases. During a rest round, use activity heal to restore your current HP up to your maximum. activity continue votes to move on; the group advances when a majority is ready.

Recovering lost maximum HP requires either time away from combat or the right facility.

• Wait it out. Maximum HP regenerates automatically after 6 hours without taking damage. Logging off overnight is enough to fully recover.
• Soak at the Cuìquán Teahouse in Zhūwān. The mineral springs in the teahouse cellar are the only place in the empire where degraded max HP can be restored on demand. 2 Gold Dollars at the front desk buys an afternoon’s access; in the pool, you regain 1 maximum HP every 15 minutes until you are back to full.

There is no in-game heal command from town apothecaries or surgeons. Towns have herbalists and apothecaries as flavour and roleplay anchors, but mechanical HP recovery runs through rest, activity heal rounds, and (for max-HP damage) the Zhūwān springs.

Quick Command Reference

Command	Purpose
attack <target>	Start a fight, or set your attack target during combat
fight <target>	Alias for attack
spar <target>	Start a friendly sparring match
stance	Show known styles and active stance
stance <style>	Switch to a different combat style (outside combat only)
study <target>	Observe someone to learn their style
study stop	Stop observing
combat	Show combat status during a fight
combat enemies	List enemies with HP and position
combat allies	List allies with HP and position
combat recommend	Get a target suggestion
combat actions	List available actions this round
combat menu	Show the quickmenu as numbered text
activity heal	Heal during an activity rest round
activity continue	Vote to move on during an activity rest round